[PREV - GREATEST_MUSIC_VIDEO] [TOP]
May 22, 2013
August 29, 2013
First, hold-up. If you haven't actually
looked at the greatest music video ever made:
GREATEST_MUSIC_VIDEO
... you don't want to read all of this sideways
commentary, hemming-and-hawing about the
source of it's appeal. Don't wallow in
skepticism about the purity of the esthetics,
dive-in, embrace the moment, seize the daisy,
skip this ultimately empty, distant analytic Tis perhaps a pale
meandering for now, and give the pure joy shadow of the true
a chance to wash over you. dionysian ecstasy, but
the real thing is a
Once you *have* seen it, you might compare little hard to take,
it to my *last* pick for greatest music video: anyway.
HYPERDOLLS
It's disturbing how many of the
same elements are in play there:
monsters, Japanese girls, and jokey
media satire. You couldn't play (March 18, 2014)
the two of them back-to-back,
they'd kill each other's effect. Long after first seeing it
as a kid, I became fascinated
Am I just some sort of asian-fetish, with "The Faerie Twins" (aka
kawaii-junkie, godzilla baby, "The Peanuts") doing the
with tastes effectively hardwired Mothera song.
by identity and upbringing?
(We went to see Mothera
last Mother's Day...)
It's also distressing to look at
some other work by the same
director, for example his 1997 [link]
"Faith No More" video that's a
pretty silly jokey "satiric"
rip-off of Hitchcock's movie Wait, maybe it's an "homage":
Vertigo.
By my usual methods,
I should put this in
What makes one video work so a page called "HO_MAGE".
well, and the other so stupid,
and flat? Does the director make
a habit of raiding
films for material?
It could be that the
AKB48 video works better He often has a very,
simply because it has shall we say,
a slightly wider range: "cinematic" approach:
a lot of the feeling of
absuridity is from [link]
bouncing around between
different genres, channel (An EMINEM video with
flipping through Sasha Gray...)
japanese trash media.
In contrast, doing a
video that references Once you recognize formula
a *single* movie as formula, it kills the
seems much less creative. magic.
But then, that Hyper-Dolls
video, that has a tighter
focus (a satire of super hero
anime and monster movies),
that for me works about as It could be just that
well as the AKB48. I've never particularly
*liked* Vertigo (The
scenes of SF are nice,
but the movie doesn't
make any sense).
Or maybe the trouble is
that with Vertigo, that
old familiar sensation
of the exotic is lost.
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